Seeking useful patterns wherever they appear.

Monthly Archives: January 2009

At 15%+ of U.S. GDP, it’s impossible to ignore health care as a vector for investment. By all accounts the system is badly broken, which should create myriad opportunities for nimble startups to find and exploit inefficiencies. But the sheer size and complexity of the system, not to mention the thicket of state and federal continue…

Longtime readers will remember Askablogr, a blog Q&A widget I created with my friend Craig as an experiment in late 2007. I just realized that Wednesday was the product’s 1-year birthday, so here’s a brief update for anyone who’s been wondering what happened since I stopped paying attention. Members: 701Questions: 1,220PageRank: 4Alexa Rank: 785,941Visits: 12,382Page continue…

Tim O’Reilly has used the phrase “stuff that matters” before, but yesterday he laid out his rough definition of what that means to him, and it’s a list that will probably resonate with anyone who’s taken a more entrepreneurial path in life. It’s a long-ish post but the actual list of “stuff” is short: Work continue…

Cost-efficient transaction processing for “micropayments” (transactions in amounts less than $10) is one of the many unrealized dreams of the Internet age. Of the literally dozens of venture-backed companies that have attempted to crack the opportunity, only PayPal can claim even modest success (just last October they announced new, lower micropayments pricing designed to capture continue…

Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web has a great post out today on the cultural shift underway in consumer computing. His premise is that the first generation of PC software (and specifically the once-dominant paradigm of Microsoft Windows + Office) made computing tasks too hard to understand, alienating most users. By contrast, the current generation of continue…

An old friend once shared a telling (and slightly off-color) story about working for a Hollywood studio. He didn’t have much money and his car was a shabby older model. One day his boss (a successful producer) took him aside and urged him to upgrade for the sake of his professional image: “In this town,” continue…

I’ve been watching Google’s Android project with interest to see if (unlike so many other Google projects) it will actually amount to something. It’s still very early in the game, but everything I’m seeing tells me that Android is about to become one of the top stories in tech for 2009. Here are some of continue…